


Low roar.

by orange_crushed



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst, Avengers: Age of Ultron (Movie), Canon Divergence - Avengers: Age of Ultron (Movie), F/M, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced Incest, Introspection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-27
Updated: 2015-08-27
Packaged: 2018-04-17 14:08:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,205
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4669487
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orange_crushed/pseuds/orange_crushed
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It was her birthday, nineteen, a year without a cake or a song, without foster parents anymore, the cold people who’d at least kept them sleeping indoors. They slept on the streets in Brno, wearing three layers of coats and leggings under their jeans, hiding their faces in scarves and curling into one another as close as they could. They walked at night when they couldn’t fall asleep, when they got chased out of the square. That night they’d gone over the bridge, over the river, following the street called Sokolova. He’d laughed at the sign and said, <i>close enough</i>. He’d joked that they were almost home.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Low roar.

Sometimes she can’t help it, wandering into their heads: catching the last words of a song they can’t stop looping. Veering when their attention veers. There are moments when she’s caught up in the foreign grip of their curiosity, staring out the window at a bird, at a person stories below, a wisp of cloud. In mission briefings they are always so professional, always calculating entry vectors and delivering recon reports and making flippant words about death, about fun, about the hobbies they don’t have. But she knows, she knows, she is there inside them when the first shots fire, when the bay doors open and the wind roars under their feet. She can feel the instant fresh doubt stabs into one of them, fine and needling as the point of an arrow. She knows when they’re afraid. Other things, too. Affection, pride: warm swells like the touch of sunshine after sitting in shade. They rise across the horizon of their minds, slide over her skin and make the hairs stand on end, when Sam does a loop of the side of the carrier, when the Widow makes sly jokes over the comms. When she herself stays longest on the training floor.

“Looking sharp,” Steve calls over the railing. 

He has a towel slung over his shoulders, only the lightest flush on his cheeks from running twenty-five miles. He really is unnatural, a beautiful doll filled with batteries that never stop running. She likes that about him, that he was made out of something else. So was she. “You get through all of those?” She looks down at the target dummies at the other end of the gymnasium, scattered in burnt husks. Her power can be erratic, explosive at times. At other times, she struggles to summon it fully. It helps sometimes when the world falls away, when it is only her and the swell of force, the cry of rage, when she works by feel instead of sight. She has been closing her eyes.

“All of them,” she says. She took them apart and put them back together and took them apart again. But they weren’t right the second time, they fell to pieces too easily, too much like store mannequins. Her fixes still aren’t as good as her breaks. That feels like a lesson but she resists knowing it. Like a child she’s tired, she wants to lie down and watch cartoons, bury her head under a pillow. Sleep for days. She isn’t filled with batteries, with anything but human meat and bone. She hasn’t trained as long as the others. She could use something they call _leg day_.

“Nice work,” Steve says, and nods at her, and rubs tiny beads of sweat from his face. There it is, for a moment: a flash of pride. Of happiness. To see her thriving. It lifts her for a second before it drops her. Before she remembers to be busy forgetting.

He doesn’t know. None of them know, her new friends. What she is. What she is doing.

 

 

 

 

They were in Brno for a while, when the fighting got too bad, when Pietro had broken too many windows and she’d gotten herself on too many government lists, and everywhere they went the police stopped them, searched their bags, held them overnight sometimes, or left them handcuffed for hours in the back of a riot van with other sullen, purple-eyed teenagers. It was her birthday, nineteen, a year without a cake or a song, without foster parents anymore, the cold people who’d at least kept them sleeping indoors. They slept on the streets in Brno, wearing three layers of coats and leggings under their jeans, hiding their faces in scarves and curling into one another as close as they could. They walked at night when they couldn’t fall asleep, when they got chased out of the square. That night they’d gone over the bridge, over the river, following the street called Sokolova. He’d laughed at the sign and said, _close enough_. He’d joked that they were almost home. They’d gone back, of course. Not only because there was nowhere else to go. It was what you did, what you were supposed to do: go back. Stand up. Keep fighting. The boot in your back was a reminder that some people were standing already. Get up and stand taller. Now she wonders what’s happening over there, halfway across the world. Whether the aid that flooded in will go to the right people, to the children, the hospitals and schools, the ones whose houses disappeared into the sky. Or if the world’s money will slip back into suit pockets, bunkers. If she will return and find the crater still smoking, one enormous grave. She is responsible for those people, that place. 

“We’ll go back,” Pietro had promised, then. On her birthday, inside the cathedral, lighting a candle. He didn’t have faith but their mother did, at least a little. Her few prayers were always for them. Under the eyes of Christ he’d taken her cold hands between his and kissed the knuckles, uncurled them to blow warm air from his lungs into her palms. “We’ll go home.”

There is no such thing anymore. She knows what a cliché it is, how sad and rote it sounds to say _you were my home_ , to cry that he is gone and she is left without shelter, without anchor, but the truth is unbearably simple. She watched half a city be vaporized in an instant, bricks turned back into clay and blocks to lime and sand. This is what happened, this is how quick it was. He took the world with him, ripped up the building to the foundations, the basement and the windows and the copper in the walls. There is water spouting from the pipes into the ruin now, the stairs go up and up towards nothing. She knows she didn’t cause it, doesn’t blame herself, except for when- except for the moments when the night is too dark, when the thrum of the carrier or the humming safety lights can’t keep it away, the great ghostly absence of him, the empty shape in the bed. Her shame. Her great sin. If she hadn’t loved him wrong, if she hadn’t wanted what she wanted, who knows? Who knows what might have been. Did she offend whatever it was- the saints, the ghosts of their dead parents, the natural order- and therefore curse him? If she loved him better, or less, maybe he wouldn’t have been there. At her side always. Listening to her revolutionary talk, joining her student clubs, making signs in the basement of the coffeehouse. Volunteering. Maybe he’d have still been in a jail cell in Ostrova, in Vienna with an old girlfriend, at university falling asleep in a book. Slow and alive. She would cut her arm off and hand it to God, smiling, if it would help, if it would pay the debt back, bring him into the world again, even if he’d come back as somebody else’s son, a stranger who would never look into her eyes or hold her hands in his, not even once. She would give God her heart fresh from her body, hand it over beating. Close her eyes and float into hell like a swan. But these are not the kind of prayers God answers: he does not make deals with the likes of her. 

_Fine_ , she thinks. It’s alright. She’ll do it herself. _Uzdaj se u se i u svoje kljuse_ , so they say, trust yourself and your horse. There’s no horse. Wanda will have to do.

 

 

 

 

The idea came to her in one of those moments, one of those beats of someone else’s heart. She didn’t mean to listen, didn’t mean to slip behind their eyes. She was standing against the railing outside the center, listening to the trees rustle in the wind. It’s hard to hear over the training and drilling and building sometimes. Over the sound of planes lifting off. The base was quiet, then. It was early evening, right at the point where the sun hangs lowest and longest before it drops, like a swimmer hesitating above cold water. No missions to be carried out. Nowhere to be but lost in thought, or resolutely avoiding it.

Clint had come to stand at her elbow in silence: he was there as a favor, dropping something off, a package from Stark, something sensitive. They’d asked Clint what it was and he’d told them he had no idea. “None of my business anymore,” he’d said, and put his hands up, but for a second only she’d known exactly how curious he really was. Well, maybe that’s not true. Not _only_. Wanda suspects the Widow can read him just as well. 

And she can do it without prying.

With Clint beside her, staring out at the expanse of green between them and the sunset, Wanda had wondered if he had come there to say something, to dig it all up again. He’d told her how sorry he was, in his own short way: told her with his words but mainly with his eyes and his haunted imaginings, with the shadows in his face. She’d had nothing left to give him, then: no absolution, but no guilt either. Nothing at all. She’d thought to herself, _if he apologizes again, I will scream_. But she’d known she wouldn’t. She’d have thanked him. She still wants to thank him, really thank him: he carried the body back in his own arms, smeared blood across his hands. Brought him back. If not for him, there would be dust and bone spread across the sea by now, pieces she could never have collected. It fills her with horror, floods her dreams sometimes. Her nightmares. 

“You adjusting?” he’d asked, instead. He’d asked it quietly, politely, almost soft enough that she could have ignored it if she chose to. A kindness. She’d managed to smile at him.

“Mostly.” That was true. “They’ve made me very comfortable.” She had gotten very adjusted to the single-serving coffee machine, the luxurious showers. Certain things were easy: eating in their cafeteria, picking out her clothes. Even training was welcome. It helped her sleep at night, on their soft clean bunks. Her needs were met, her desires were considered. How could one not adjust to that? It was just everything else, all the things inside of her, that were shit. Which was nobody’s business. “How about you?” she’d asked, not even bothering to hide the redirect.

“Mostly,” he’d echoed. And smiled, too. “Thinking about putting in some French doors.”

And there it was. A thread at the front of his mind, a twist of light like the tail of a flare. It dangled in front of her and Wanda was weak enough to pull at it, to follow it just a little, to take a peek. She saw a vision of children playing, hazy in golden sunlight, fresh as peaches and so alive. But that wasn’t it, that wasn’t the thread, the strange atonal note. Wanda slipped into his mind for a moment and almost fell off the balcony, almost tipped off the side into space. Him. Him, Pietro, there was- there was a memory, Clint’s memory, it was so real, called up so strongly by her presence that it was almost overwhelming. In the eye of her mind, so real, so terribly real, there was Pietro. Silhouetted against the smoke, blood seeping through his shirt. She could smell the copper, feel the grit against her face, she could see his eyes bloom with pain. She tried to keep from crying out, giving herself away: she’d promised no more mind games, and Clint liked them the least already. Maybe this was what he still saw sometimes when he tried to fall asleep, when his children played and laughed before him, one more death in a field already choked with poppies. But even as she pried herself away from his mind, tried to control herself, she realized: it was her that brought this forth. Her presence that reminded him so freshly- reminded them all- of Pietro. Her grief that kept him alive in their minds. “You alright?” Clint had asked, after no more than a second or two had passed, when her grip on the railing had just turned her knuckles white.

“I’m fine,” she’d said. “Just- a little, I worked a little hard today.”

That night, alone in her room, she built it again from memory. The smoke and ash clouds, the angry hiss of bots as they rushed past in the sky and collided with the transport ships. The scream of metal. And him: the shape of him that she could never forget, the body she has pressed her heart against a hundred thousand times. The fringe of white he insisted on, catching stray winds. He dyed his hair in the sink over and over when they were teenagers, green and yellow and blue, washing down the drain in impressionistic swirls. But the white stuck. She told him he looked like the top of a mountain dusted with snow, Praděd at New Year’s. She would run her fingers through it, pretending it chilled her. She worked and worked that night, summoning him up, shutting her mind to the world beyond her illusions, to everything but him. He was so real she could almost touch him. He was so close she could almost feel his breath. And when she was exhausted, when she couldn’t hold it anymore, when that false reality began to fade, something remarkable happened. Wanda opened her eyes and he was still there. Just for a second: a hallucination. Like staring into a lamp and then shutting it off, seeing its ghost in the darkness. For a moment he was real again, more real than the floor or the bed, so real, standing in her room against the dull metal walls. Meat and bone and frowning face, his beautiful face that could look so grim until he laughed. Hers. “ _Brat_ ,” she’d whispered, like a foolish maiden in a fairy tale. And the other word, unspoken. _Dragi_. He’d vanished when she blinked and she’d cried herself sick, cried until she heaved into the dull metal toilet they’d allotted her. 

And then she’d started over.

Every night he gets clearer, closer. Every time she tries he stays longer, long enough almost to speak to, long enough for his eyes to land on her before they dissolve into air. She started building him from her own memories but then she found she could mine from the minds of the others: pluck and pull and dig up their rememberings of him, use them to build facets and angles. She can fill in the times she wasn’t looking, things she couldn’t have seen. There’s so little, but everything she adds makes him stronger. More convincing. More alive in himself, more awake. Almost whole.

This is the secret. If they knew, they would stop her. But they don’t know. They’ll never know. It won’t hurt them, she’s certain of it. It’s such a small thing, after all: one life. Half a life, really: the other half of her, the missing piece. They won’t even notice. One day they will go to sleep one way, and wake up another. They will wake into a world with one more person in it. And only Wanda will know the difference.

 

 

 

 

She almost gives it away. The funniest thing is that it’s him, the robot man, the one who saved her from falling. Of all the people around her, he is the one she almost confides in, almost falters before. She doesn’t know why. His gentleness, maybe. She is so tired, so raw at all of her ends. The gentleness almost does it.

“I’ve completed the field report,” he says, and she startles, sits up on the bench and pulls her earbuds out and stares at him. He frowns down at himself. “I apologize,” he says, stiffly. “I should have announced myself before I-”

“It’s okay,” she interrupts. “I wasn’t- I was only listening to music. Nothing important.”

“Music is important,” he says. Wanda’s not sure how serious he’s being, but then the corners of his mouth tilt up. “I myself am currently running Prokofiev’s _Cinderella_.”

“Ah,” she says. “Just for fun?”

“I-” he starts, and stops. There is a surprising pause. It’s the first time she’s ever seen him fail to finish a sentence. “Yes,” he says, slowly. “I originally- music is excellent for concentration, but that’s not- that wasn’t precisely my reason,” he concludes, He sounds almost dazed. It would be dazed, on a human. On him it is more like faint bemusement. “I think it might be. For fun.”

“Wow,” she says. She can feel her own expression splitting into a grin. She didn’t even mean to, but she can’t stop it. “How human.” He looks at her and now there is something strange in his face, a softness that is not human at all but angelic, beatific. Grateful.

“It awes me,” he says. 

“What does?”

“Your suffering,” he says. “Your strength. Humanity. Prokofiev suffered, you know. Chronic illness. Poverty.”

“I didn’t know,” Wanda murmurs, feeling uncomfortable. Exposed. She doesn’t know what else to say. 

“Still, you make such beauty. Bring such creations into the world. That’s your hallmark. To make something from nothing. That’s your gift. I wonder if I will ever truly understand it.”

“I,” Wanda says, and then shuts her mouth again. “I don’t know if anyone understands it.” She looks away from him. She almost- there was almost a break in her silence, something too close to a confession. She wonders if he would understand it, him and him alone: he was invented out of an idea, pulled from thin air. It should be impossible for him to judge. But she holds her tongue. “I think that’s part of being human,” she says, finally. “Wanting something. Doing something. But not always knowing why.”

“I imagine it must be difficult,” he says. “Having no logic paths to trace.”

“Very difficult,” she says.

 

 

 

 

One day, she tells herself. One day she’ll roll over in this bunk and her elbow will connect with his stomach. And he will groan and rub his face and mumble and roll over, taking her pillow with him. And she will lie in bed with her eyes shut and feel his warmth behind her, his hand searching for her hip, pulling her over to lie against his back, to tuck her arm around him, her hand against his heart. And she will lie very still and feel it beating under her palm. And the world will resume turning around them, parting for them, making way, the way water flows around the rock. She will bring it into being. She will be patient, and hard-working. Her fixes will hold: they will be so clean, so good, they will last as long as she does, a whole lifetime. They will be more powerful than reality itself. Soon. When she’s stronger. For now, she puts her arms around her pillow and rests her cheek against the cotton.

They are almost home.

 

.


End file.
